In the immediate aftermath of spectacular violence, a poem often goes viral on social media. When Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, people posted excerpts from Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere.” Israel bombed Gaza in May of 2021 and Noor Hindi’s “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” proliferated on Twitter timelines. While Russia invaded Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War” seemed, somehow, to be everywhere. Sharing a poem is obviously a profoundly inadequate response to violence. And as the tally of likes and shares mounts, the insufficiency of the gesture only deepens. At a certain point, the smooth, bloated we congregating around the verses in the no-place of social media begins to feel like a willful obfuscation of the social landscape, whose jagged topography underwrites the brutality that prompted the sharing in the first place. On social media, refusal and collusion can speak in a single voice. And the poem—as well as the poet, whether they like it or not—accrues something in this conflation.
Solmaz Sharif wrestles with the ways that acclaim can become an imperial enclosure; I once heard her say, “I try to write poems that make it impossible to applaud afterward.” Reaching toward forms of relation that are not fully apprehensible from life in the metropole, her work rejects the embrace of any we for whom sharing is an uncomplicated act. In her 2016 debut collection, Look, Sharif—who was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents and grew up in the United States—refused American civil rituals of polite consensus and exposed the ways state violence takes place in and through language. Reappropriating terms from the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, where ordinary English is redefined in service of statecraft, Sharif mapped empire’s brutal trespasses. These words appear in the poems in capital letters, simultaneously disrupting and constructing scenes—often intimate and domestic. In the title poem, for example, the DoD’s definition of “look” (“a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence”) jostles the ordinary one: “Let me LOOK at you. // Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.” As the eerie convergence between the militarized and the quotidian agitates the language, any pretense of neutral description falls away. Reading these poems, it is impossible to sustain the fiction of a relationship—including a readership—wholly bracketed from the world empire has made.
If, as Sharif wrote in her 2014 essay “A Poetry of Proximity,” “language is we realized,” then Look elucidates the fissures in our we like the dark web disrupting the bright bone in an X-ray image of a fractured leg. In a conversation with the poet Alina Stefanescu, Sharif described the book as “diagnostic”: “I point to the intolerable, and I name it as intolerable. And the idea is to keep doing that until we can’t take it anymore and we all agree we must change it.” In her new collection, Customs, Sharif remains concerned with the violence of an imperial we—its demands and foreclosures, its harms of definitive exclusion as well as contingent inclusion. But in these poems, Sharif turns away from describing what is and toward the pull of what might be: “For me,” she explains, “the why of poetry [is] . . . no longer the conditions that make revolution inevitable, but what’s waiting for us on the other side.” An unstable social arrangement both animates and vexes this why: If we names those who comprise a violent present, what does it mean to imagine an us on revolution’s other side?
In Customs, a disjunctive presence rattles the social—a lyric I, alienated in the imperial center and far from the life she should have lived. Out of sync with her surroundings, the speaker wields the perceptive powers estrangement grants. In “America,” a thin, brief poem printed twice (once at the collection’s opening and again on the back cover, where blurbs might otherwise be), Sharif foregrounds the distortions of the frame obscured by the common sense of nationalist logics:
I had
to. I
learned it.
It was
if. If
was nice.
I said
sure. One
more thing.
One more
thing. Eat
it said.
It felt
good. I
was dead.
I learned
it. I
had to.
Like the discord between the speaker and the country in which she finds herself, the misalignment between the poem’s line and syntax destabilizes the assertion of a single, uncontested meaning. As the scholar Kamran Javadizadeh points out, “enjambments betray the ambivalence of these declarations. The poem’s simple first sentence—‘I had / to.’—might at first, because of the line break, imply that this ‘I’ is making a statement about what, at some undefined point in the past, she possessed: I had a home, I had a family.” But the sentence’s conclusion on the next line swiftly displaces those possessive possibilities. “Had,” it turns out, does not enrich the speaker; it describes her subjection. Still, the negation of that original possibility does not make it disappear. Instead, loosed from the constraints of denotation, had becomes unwieldy: The loss the speaker is sentenced to is haunted by the promise—or is it the memory?—of ownership. The polysemic surplus pulls me deeper until the chiastic ending cuts off the sense of possibility by reiterating the repressive enclosures of nationalist pedagogy: “I learned / it. I / had to.”
A later poem picks up this thread of imperial instruction in a different site; each line of “Learning Persian” is a transliteration of a word—“ahm-pee-ree-ah-lizm / doh-see-eh / oh-toh-ree-te”—that has entered Farsi from a European language. An exilic subject seeking to reconnect with her mother tongue will find any fantasy of pure return contaminated by empire’s global reach: “No crueler word than return. / No greater lie. // The gates may open but to return. / More gates were built inside,” Sharif writes in “Without Which,” a long poem in the book’s second section. These mutual imbrications map the violent contours of the we in the imperial world at large. After all, occupation, too, is a kind of sharing. Even as they seek a radically transformative sociality, Sharif’s poems, which are written in English and published in the United States, circulate among a readership bound up with the we of empire. In her conversation with Stefanescu, Sharif prefaces a story about a political prisoner by saying, “I don’t know if I want to share this”; I hear the echo of this uncertainty through the poems as well.
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